No one can blame Frank Clements if he spends some time catching up on his favorite pastimes watching TV shows on Netflix, reading and running, now that he’s back home from an ascetic research trip to the mountains of Japan.

The University of Pennsylvania Ph.D. student’s dissertation centers on the Shugendô mountain religious tradition based at Mt. Haguro in Northeastern Japan, close to the area that was devastated by the triple disaster of 2011: an earthquake, a tsunami and the Fukushima nuclear accident.

Shugendô blends esoteric Buddhism, Daoism and Shinto into a complex tradition of mountain austerities and other related practices.

Clements was in Japan last month to conduct research and participate in a series of ascetic retreats, the central practice of Shugendô. The retreats ranged from three days to a week in length.  

At a three-day retreat at the shukubô daishôbô or pilgrim lodge in Haguro, Clements sought spiritual and personal enlightenment, eschewing everyday creature comforts.

“Participants are forbidden to wash, brush their teeth or cut their hair. It involves getting up early, reciting sutras [texts of Buddhist sermons] and going on hikes up and down mountains to sacred locations, as well as standing under ice-cold waterfalls,” Clements says.

His dissertation is on the range and roles of Shugendô networks in northern Japan. He is enrolled in a Ph.D. program in the East Asian Languages and Civilizations Department of the Graduate Division of the School of Arts & Sciences at Penn.

He studies the Shugendô mountain Buddhism of Mt. Haguro in northern Japan from the 17th through the 19th centuries, with a focus on two prominent families of ascetics and their connection to their parishioners, samurai lord and local religious authorities.

At Penn, Clements sharpens his skills reading old Japanese handwritten texts through participation in the Reading Asian Manuscripts Faculty Working Group of Penn Arts & Sciences.  

He completed a year in Japan on a Japan Foundation Fellowship and is one of the winners of the inaugural Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Program in Buddhist Studies Dissertation Fellowship. The global competition is administered by the American Council of Learned Societies

“We are thrilled that a Penn student's work was recognized with one of the first awards,” says Linda Chance, associate professor of Japanese in East Asian Languages and Civilizations in Penn Arts & Sciences.

While in Japan, Clements spent hours at the Tsuruoka Municipal Library in Yamagata Prefecture poring over hundreds of handwritten materials. He studied local maps, bonds, diaries, letters, territory deeds and other materials dating from the 17th to the 19th centuries. More than 700 documents were preserved and donated to the library by the Sanada Gyokuzôbô family, one of the two families that Clements studies.

“I was also allowed to look at the death records of the two families' traditional mortuary temple in Haguro,” he says. “The Sanada Gyokuzôbô documents were initially cataloged by Dr. Kenji Matsuo of Yamagata University, who was my adviser in Japan and encouraged me to continue the work he began with them.”

Clements, who was born and raised in the Philadelphia suburb of Levittown, Pa., initially became interested in Japanese history and religion as an undergraduate student at Dickinson College. After earning his degree, he lived in Morioka, Iwate Prefecture in northern Japan, for two years.

In a course on Japanese religion that he took at Nanzan University in Nagoya, Japan, he read a book called The Catalpa Bow: A Study of Shamanistic Practices in Japan by Carmen Blacker. Its descriptions of Japanese folk religion and shamanism and analysis of the religious tradition deepened his interest in the subject.

Through participating in the Shugendô austerities at Mt. Haguro and visiting interesting temples and shrines, Clements experienced firsthand the things and places he learned about in his studies.

Before leaving for Japan last year, the avid reader had to return several “suitcase fulls” of books to Penn’s Van Pelt Library. The Penn library system has a huge selection of books on Japanese religion.

Clements is starting the seventh and final year of his doctoral program and hopes to soon successfully reach the end of the pipeline from graduate school to professoriate.